Escape Velocity Calculator
Personal expenditure < personal capital income. Cross that line and you're no longer falling, you're in orbit. Pull the levers, dial the assumptions, and see the month your capital's own income overtakes what you spend.
Set your numbers below.
Start from scratch
No capital yet, a quarter of the wage to the taxman, and everything not saved is spent. Pick an income, then pick a savings rate, then start arguing with the levers below.
Levers
The numbers you actually control. Drag the slider or type an exact figure, they stay in sync.
Assumptions
The parts nobody can pin down. Dial them up or down and watch the crossover move. That's the point.
Capital income vs. expenses
Return buys years, and it does not buy them evenly.
Everything else held exactly where you have it. The gap between the first two is worth more than the gap between the last two, which is why costs and fees matter more than they look.
Take the date with you
The date, the mark, and nothing else. No amounts leave this page, the same rule the portfolio keeps. Set it as a wallpaper, send it to the one person who will hold you to it, or keep it where the spreadsheet used to be.
In orbit: the rails
Past the line the question changes from how much to how much to take. A fixed payout sells the most shares at the worst prices; a percentage that follows the market cuts the dinner table the moment it sneezes. The thesis runs guardrails: an anchor inside a band, one check a year against the real value of the pot, and a floor under spending. Inside the band nothing changes. Below it, spend more. Above it, cut, but never below the floor.
| Real pot | Payout share | Action | New spending |
|---|
A rough decade on the rails
Ten invented years of real returns, run through your rule from the anchor. A buffer of two years of spending is what makes a cut survivable: the lean years are paid from cash, never from the engine.
Year by year
| Year | Capital | Capital income | Expenses | Gap |
|---|
This tool models compounding under fixed assumptions you choose. Real markets don't move in straight lines: sequence-of-returns risk, taxes, and life itself will all deviate from whatever you dial in here. It's a way to reason about the mechanics, not a forecast, and nothing it shows is investment, tax, or legal advice.
A number is not an argument. The argument: